jq not working with exclamation mark as an input

Question

I am passing username and password to jq the following way:

json=$(jq -n --arg u "user_dev" --arg p "user!" '{username: $u, password: $p}')

However, it is failing and giving the following output:

-bash: !": event not found

It seem that it is not liking exclamation mark with the arg p "user!"

Efforts to build a [mcve] presumably would have lead to a discovery that this is reproducible without `jq` involved at all. — Charles Duffy, May 15 '17 at 20:05

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 15 '17 at 19:52

The shell is interpreting it as a history expansion. Use single quotes instead to prevent that.

json=$(jq -n --arg u "user_dev" --arg p 'user!' '{username: $u, password: $p}')

That said, bash 4.3 includes a fix to prevent that from happening. From the changelog:

l. The history expansion character (!) does not cause history expansion when followed by the closing quote in a double-quoted string.

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